All right, well, as I said, this is part two of Israel in the wilderness, and it's really the book of Deuteronomy. We covered a lot of ground last time going through the book of numbers, brief overview of Leviticus, and understanding what happened since Israel left Mount Sinai. Well, what I'd like to do is really quickly review a little bit of that and do the transition with where we are here in the plains of Moab. So remember that when Israel at Mount Sinai sinned with the golden calf, a lot happened as a result.
God gave them a new priesthood, God gave them new laws, all for the purposes of being remedial, penitential and educational for his people. All right, we saw these verses before and they're repeating now again in Galatians 3 19 says why then the law it was added because of transgressions. And Hebrew 7 10 says when there was a change in the priesthood, there is necessarily a change in the law. So with the sin of the golden calf, you've got new priesthood, which means new laws, on top of which they had new laws because of their transgressions.
Okay, so if there were no golden calf, there would have been no Leviticus. Well, throughout the desert wanderings as well, as you remember, Israel just send over and over and over again. They're rebelling against God, murmuring and complaining and wanting to go back to Egypt, idealizing their life in Egypt, rejecting God's promises of victory, of giving them the land, rejecting the manna and all these things. So one thing that you'll notice if you read numbers carefully is that each time they rebel, or at least with some serious rebellions, there are additional laws given throughout the book of Numbers.
So you have laws in Leviticus, you have additional laws in Numbers, and where we left off, the last major rebellion was the second generation's ginormous, ginormous, humongous, aggrevious sin at Balpeor in Numbers 25. So the second generation is guilty of the same kind of sin that the first generation was guilty of. They broke the covenant, they commit what we would call mortal sin. And so now Moses has to give them additional laws, and that's the book of Deuteronomy.
Okay, so if there, like I said a moment ago, if there was no golden calf, there would be no Leviticus, if there were no Balpeor, no falling from grace of the second generation, then there would be no Deuteronomy. So this whole concept of giving additional laws because of transgressions is what we do with children, or at least, you know, I think what most people do with children, if you break a particular law, you have other laws given or rules, a family rules given in order to bring the kid back to the straight and narrow. If a teen is constantly breaking curfew, well, then you're going to either bring the curfew in a bit, you're going to chaperone your teen, or you're not going to let the teen go out at all, like whatever it might be, you pick your example, this is pretty common, businesses do the same thing. Some creative employee comes up with this hairbrained idea or action behavior and HR needs to come in and be like, okay, well, I guess we need new laws in order to rein this stuff in.
So this is very, very common, very natural in the human world. You give more laws because of transgressions. So Deuteronomy literally means, deuteronomous, it means second law. It is a second law given in addition to the laws of Mount Sinai.
And that's actually said explicitly in Deuteronomy 29 verse one. This is an additional law, a second law, but it has the sense of secondary, meaning it's temporary, it's imperfect. And that's very true because it is full of concessions, full of concessions for a hard-hearted people that is prone to rebel and to murmur against God. So these various laws, not all of them, numerous laws here as concessions, they are essentially Moses coming down to their level, making concessions for them and trying to meet them where they are to hopefully bring them back up to a higher standard, which ultimately Jesus is going to do on a loxlyn later in our lecture here.
So there are many, many sacrifices, many concessions and a couple of verses here prove the point. In Ezekiel chapter 20 verses 21 through 25, there's this line where God says, I give them a gave them statutes that were not good and ordinances by which they could not have life. Right? God gives them really through Moses.
Moses gives them and God permits these various statutes that weren't and ordinances that were not good. And I'll explain some of those later on. And even Jesus himself says in Matthew 19 verse eight, he says, because of the hardness of your hearts, Moses allowed you to divorce your wives. But from the beginning, it was not so.
You know, Moses had to concede and give this concession of divorce because they were so hard-hearted. And I'll explain that when we get to the appropriate time as well. So Moses meets them where they are. Moses gives them the law himself.
And that's a really important point. God does not speak once in the book of Deuteronomy. It's always Moses giving these laws in the first person account. Now, naturally, of course, as the mediator between the people and God God permits this, he accepts it because he knows God being wisdom itself.
He knows these concessions are necessary while Israel is basically infants. You know, as a people, they're in this infancy stage of salvation, right? And it's individuals, of course, they are spiritual infants as well. So the book of Deuteronomy here, you've got your context.
They're at the plains of Moab after ball pay or God. Sorry, Moses gives them the second law and really all of Deuteronomy. It's not just the second law, but you really should look at it as well as Moses's parting words. These are the final words that Moses gives to the people before he dies because he's not allowed to go into the land.
All right. So he gives them this, what we would call this constitution. That's another way in which people have taught that Deuteronomy kind of is like, it functions very much as their national constitution that guides daily living for the Israelites and how they are to behave and function as a nation. It's their kind of their mantra, their guide, their rule book for how they're to live.
And I've always really liked Dr. Scott Hahn has a very, very interesting comparison, not perfect by any means if you're an American scholar or history buff, you're in political science, but it's a very interesting comparison between the establishment of Israel on the one hand and America on the other. But it's interesting because it's a very easy way to understand the various periods of salvation history during this time under Moses. So in your notes here, I kind of basically took it straight from Dr.
Hahn's book, Understanding the Scriptures. And so America, first, so America was oppressed, escaped tyranny through the Declaration of Independence, had a temporary government under the Articles of Confederation, developed a final constitution from their fathers with the ability to amend it in the future. Okay, that's kind of like the general gist of American history, right? So, or at least the founding years.
So Israel in a very analogous sense here, they too were oppressed, escaped tyranny through the Exodus and the Mount Sinai Covenant. They had a temporary government under Leviticus, received their final constitution from Moses, which of course is Deuteronomy, with the ability to amend it in the future, which is exactly what Jesus will do. Okay, so I really like that. We could spend a lot of time, of course, breaking this down, the different covenants during this period.
But anyways, it's really a fascinating way to approach. And I hope you appreciate that. So with those introductory marks, having been laid out to let's dive in here and just look at Deuteronomy, keeping in mind, they're at the border with the boundary of the border land. We've come a long way from Egypt to Sinai through the desert wanderings.
Now they're about to go into the promise land, and Moses gives his last will and testament, so to speak.